Earlier this month, seven Haifa researchers were among those who received awards at IBM's annual Corporate Technical Recognition Event, or CTRE, held in Scottsdale, Arizona. The event celebrated the efforts and technical achievements of IBMers from around the globe.

The researchers from Haifa that were recognized at the CTRE include Gadi Haber, of the Code Optimization Technologies Group; Avshalom Houri, of the Software Development Group; Yossi Malka, former manager of the Verification Technologies Area; Gera Goft, of the Advanced Storage Technologies Group; and Allon Adir, Laurent Fournier, and Moshe Levinger of the Simulation-based Methods Department.

The researchers were honored for their accomplishments over the past years with awards for outstanding innovation and outstanding technical achievement. The top recipients of these prestigious divisional awards throughout IBM were recognized at CTRE 2003.

Yossi Malka, Moshe Levinger, Laurent Fournier, and Allon Adir were all honored for the work they performed on the integration of automatic test generation in IBM's processor and SMP design flows. "The award recognizes years of technical decision-making, technical contributions, and project management and guidance," Malka noted. "All of the people who received this award have made technical contributions of the highest nature." The Haifa Research Lab has long been recognized as a center of competence for IBM's verification activities and technologies. The impact of these activities was evident at this year's event, where the awards served as a follow up to the recognition for model-based test generation, received several years ago by Gil Shurek.

Dr. Michael Rodeh, director of the IBM Haifa Labs, noted that "these awards express a balance of technical contribution, together with increasing value to IBM. This is most clearly demonstrated by the use of Haifa-developed verification tools in IBM's popular ’Regatta’ eServer.”

Gadi Haber, who received his award for the work he performed as the team leader for the Feedback Directed Program Restructuring (FDPR) project, said the award marked the work he has done on FDPR since joining the project in 1997. "FDPR is heavily used by large database servers such as DB2, Oracle, Sybase, and Informix for the IBM Power architectures," noted Haber. "FDPR has managed to produce significant performance gains for the database servers on the IBM Power machines."

Gera Goft, a researcher in the Storage and Systems Department, was recognized for his efforts on High Availability Clustering for the IBM eServer iSeries. "The iSeries HA Clustering product has resulted in approximately $1 billion of attributed revenue within the first 3 years," said Goft. "We worked together with a team in Rochester, and our group in Haifa contributed the heart of the project and one of its most complex components—the group communication service integrated into the OS/400 kernel."

Avshalom Houri, a member of the IBM Haifa Labs’ Software Development Group (SWG) located in Rehovot, Israel, was granted an award for his efforts regarding the interoperability of Lotus Sametime Connect with the presence and instant messaging servers of America Online. The work was done in collaboration with Anat Fradin, also from SWG, who shared the award with him. "The SIP/SIMPLE interoperability tests we conducted between the two important industry leaders help establish the industry standard,” noted Houri. “These tests will also ease the adoption of this standard throughout the industry."